![]() ![]() There is no clear indication to me that McAdams has even read Belzer’s book. The reviews on Amazon for Belzer’s “Hit List” are more thoughtful and insightful than McAdams’ brief critique. John McAdams’ review and inadequate replies to the thread comments read like a screed or tract, as opposed to a carefully considered and well-supported analysis. He’s the webmaster of the Kennedy Assassination Home Page. John McAdams teaches political science at Marquette University. When it falls into the hands of people reasonably critical-minded (a mainstream media producer, journalist, textbook writer, or such) it tends to discredit conspiracy-oriented research. Rather, it’s pretty much free association in the minds of conspiracy-minded researchers.įorget the book’s ability to wow innocent neophytes. If we know that most of the people on the list must have died for reasons unrelated to any conspiracy, we begin to understand that no solid, objective criteria went into making it. Once we concede that this is implausible, we have to question the entire list. Then, of course, another small army of assassins would be needed to eliminate the first members of the “clean up squad.” ![]() If all of these people, or even a substantial minority, knew things dangerous to conspirators, the conspiracy must have been very large indeed, or else it leaked like a sieve, with a small army of assassins being needed to knock off everybody who might “blow the whistle.” The result is an extremely large number of supposed victims. Has anybody investigated the Grand Ole Opry? We don’t know how Patsy Cline failed to make the list. It includes mobsters, FBI people, CIA people, journalists, anti-Castro Cubans, Jack Ruby’s strippers, an orthopedic surgeon, the daughter of a fellow who knew Jack Ruby in Chicago decades before the assassination, and country singer Jim Reeves. Therefore, an absurdly large and diverse cast of characters gets a place. The real criterion for being in the book seems to be that some conspiracy author, somewhere, considered you suspicious. How is he connected? Well, Belzer explains, New Orleans was “the center-staging location for the assassination.” For example, Deslesseps Morrison, the mayor of New Orleans, is the subject of a short chapter. The “mysterious deaths” are supposed to be from among “witnesses” in the case, but in the vast majority of cases it’s not at all clear that they “witnessed” anything important, and in none of them is it clear that the “witness” had any knowledge dangerous to any conspiracy. He accepts, almost entirely at face value, the claims of Judyth Baker, James Files, James Fetzer, Dan Marvin, Chauncey Holt, Robert Morrow, Robert Morningstar and Tosh Plumlee.Īs one might expect, given that list of witnesses and sources (and some with wider support among conspiracists, such as Jim Garrison and Richard Case Nagell), the book is a mish-mash of factoids.īut worse than the factoids is the intellectual slovenliness of the entire enterprise – something that Belzer inherited from his predecessors Penn Jones (father of the “mysterious deaths” list) and Jim Marrs (who extended the list to 103 people in his 1989 book). While some writers and witnesses are believed by conspiracists and disbelieved by lone assassin theorists, what is peculiar about Belzer is that he uses so many sources that are considered unreliable (if not downright wild) by the vast majority of active conspiracy researchers. Of course Balzer uses books for sources too, but many are fringe books. You get a book like Richard Belzer’s Hit List, which claims to expose the “mysterious deaths” of people who were “witnesses to the JFK assassination.” Now suppose you are a grown up celebrity, and are writing an entire book, but your research methods are the same. And imagine you simply surf the web for information and believe pretty much anything you find on a web page. Imagine you are a high school student and you are writing a paper on some contentious historical issue - say, whether Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or whether Dick Cheney mounted the 9/11 attacks. ![]()
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